From Abracadabra to Zombies

Book Review

Entangled Minds (EM) is a sequel to Dean
Radin's 1997 defense of psychic phenomena The Conscious
Universe (CU).
EM is CU for Dummies: more of the same, but in a
casual, conversational style, and aimed at non-scientists who
are likely to be impressed by references to quantum physics.
In my review
of The
Conscious Universe, I describe how Radin distorts the
history of psi research, omitting the seedy side of the story,
and abuses statistics to make his case for the paranormal. He
repeatedly shouts out the incredible odds against chance of
getting some result in an experiment that allegedly demonstrates
telepathy, precognition, or psychokinesis, yet he still can't
find a single person in any of these experiments who is even
aware of a psychic ability, much less able to demonstrate one
under properly controlled conditions. In the end, what needs to
be explained is not psychic phenomena but why Radin and other
parapsychologists think these experiments demonstrate psi. The
true believer will not be deterred, however. Radin thinks psi
will some day be explained by fitting it into a framework of
quantum phenomena. This skeptic isn't convinced that there is anything to be
explained except Radin's belief in the reality of psi despite overwhelming evidence
against it.

Radin knows that
polls show that most people believe in some sort of psychic
phenomena. So, he is not in a minority when it comes to belief.
He notes, however, that there are
only about 50 scientists around the world engaged in full-time
psi research (p. 7). This disparity is not due to scientists
recognizing that psi research is probably a waste of time. In
Radin's view, ordinary people believe in psi because
"they see farther into the depths of the world than other people
do" (p. 51). Scientists, he
claims, are afraid to admit that they believe in psi. They don't
engage in psi research because they would be looked on as
mentally deficient if they did. Radin thinks that skeptics
consider believers stupid and have succeeded in putting the fear of God into both ordinary folks
and scientists. They dare not admit their beliefs for fear of
being ridiculed. He doesn't consider the
possibility that pandering by the media and ignorance of
affective, cognitive, and perceptual biases might account
for some of those beliefs in the paranormal.
Nor does he blush when he mentions that many great minds have
believed in psi and done psi research, including some
Nobel laureates.

He even misuses the brilliant experiment on
inattentional blindness at the University of Illinois to try
to give support to his view: just as many people don't see
things that are right before their eyes, scientists and skeptics are blind to
the reality of psi (p. 44). This is clearly hogwash. Nothing sells like the
paranormal. The popularity of psi increases with each new
television program featuring ghosts or mediums. Scientists may
be staying away from psi research because they don't see any
future in it. If there were much hope of finding anything
important by psi research, scientists would be fighting for the
opportunity to be the one to make the first great discovery. You
don't need to have precognition to see the future of this
discipline. The past provides plenty of solid evidence that the
future looks dim.

believers in psi are not
stupid

Even though Radin
provides little evidence for the claim that scientists and
skeptics view people like him as stupid or uneducated, he spends an
entire chapter arguing that believers in psi are not
stupid and uneducated, but "normal." He seems to be confusing stupidity with
ignorance. Even educated people are ignorant of many things,
including many things about
perception and the psychology of belief. As he did in CU,
Radin distorts the truth by quoting out of context. One
egregious example comes in his suggestion that the American
Psychiatric Association (APA) has declared that belief in psi is
a mental disorder (pp. 36-37). There are several mental
disorders, it is true, that manifest themselves in part by "odd beliefs
or magical thinking," including superstitious beliefs and
beliefs in clairvoyance or telepathy. Radin admits this, but the
reader is left to figure out how to make sense of his
suggestion that psychiatrists consider people like him to be mentally
ill. The least he could have done is note that most people don't
consider a person mentally ill if his delusions are shared by
numerous other people in his social group.

Radin's attitude
toward believers in psi and skeptics in EM belies his degree in
educational psychology. He should be well aware that
there is a great body of psychological literature supporting the
notion that belief or disbelief in the paranormal or supernatural is not a
matter of intelligence or education. Why a brilliant man like
Brian Josephson
would spend his days in pursuit of psi or an equally brilliant
Murray Gell-Mann would consider pursuit of psi a waste of
time is not going to be answered by looking into their IQs or
their educational experiences. Why Richard Dawkins finds atheism
a natural consequence of science and Francis Collins finds
science leads him to belief in God is not going to be understood
by probing into their intellects or education. Likewise, there
are believers and skeptics who suffer from various mental
disorders or brain malfunctions, but those disorders don't
provide an adequate explanation for why many people who don't
suffer from such disorders believe or disbelieve in the
paranormal or supernatural. This is not the place for a
full-blown discussion of the psychology of belief. I recommend
as a starting place the short article by Jim Alcock called "The
Belief Engine." Alcock uses a machine metaphor to introduce
some basic notions about beliefs, starting with the claim: "Our
brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating
machine, a system that evolved to assure not truth, logic, and
reason, but survival."

Radin's dismissal of critics

In both his books,
Radin devotes extensive space to dismissing
criticism without reviewing a single skeptical evaluation of the
data for psi. He ignores the
critiques of Ray Hyman, David Marks, Jim Alcock, Susan Blackmore,
C. E. M. Hansel, and the like. He has two
main reasons for dismissing critics: 1) they don't look at the
data, but reject psi research outright as
mistaken or fraudulent; and 2) skepticism
and critical analysis of psi research are "outdated" (p. 79),
"stubbornly incredulous" (p. 89), and "insufficient" (p.
246). The irony of reason number one is obvious. Reason number
two seems to be little more than a defense mechanism and excuse
for not doing the hard work of answering critics.

In
chapter 14 of CU,
Radin runs through a litany of cognitive biases and psychological
aberrations, which he thinks provides an adequate explanation for
why skeptics and the majority of scientists around the world don't
agree with his rosy assessment of the evidence for psi. Radin may not believe it, but this skeptic is more interested in
why he believes what he does than in what he believes. The 'why'
I'm most interested in, however, is not the 'why' he seems to focus on. I
want to know what his reasons for believing are, not what cognitive
bias or psychological aberration led him to his belief. Any
speculation on biases is secondary to critical evaluation of the
data he presents.

I have no
reason to doubt that Radin is an intelligent, highly educated,
experienced, "normal" person. I find his data and arguments
unconvincing, and I state why I find them unconvincing. Others, much
more knowledgeable than I of the history of psi research, have also
stated why they find the data and the arguments for psi lacking.
Radin chooses to ignore us, except to hurl a blanket accusation at
us that we are fearful, lazy, or irrationally obstinate.

I took
Radin to task in my review of CU for the way he considers the affective,
cognitive, and perceptual biases that hinder all of us from thinking
critically and evaluating experience and experiments fairly. I used
CU as a text in a course I taught called
Critical Thinking
about the Paranormal. My method in that course was to review the
biases before reviewing the psi anecdotes and experiments.
Knowledge of the biases, in my opinion, helps the student assess the
data with more critical thinking tools at her disposal. Radin's goal
in CU is to bias the reader in favor of psi, and
then use the discussion of such things as confirmation bias to
pigeonhole skeptical viewpoints.

A
critical thinker needs to have a solid foundation in the
psychology of belief in order to apply logic and careful
reasoning to experiences and experiments. But criticism should
focus primarily on the data and the arguments, not on the
possible psychological biases of the one presenting the data or
making the arguments.

the leap to quantum
physics

Entanglement is a concept from quantum
physics that refers to connections between subatomic particles
that persist regardless of being separated by various distances.
Radin notes that some physicists have speculated that the entire
universe might be entangled and that some Eastern mystics might
have been on to something cosmic. His speculations are rather
wild, but his assertions are rather modest. For example: "I
believe that entanglement suggests a scenario that may
ultimately lead to a vastly improved understanding of psi" (p.
14, italics added) and "I propose that the fabric of reality is
comprised [sic] of 'entangled threads' that are consistent with
the core of psi experience" (p. 19).

John
Renish calls the idea of the entire Universe being entangled
just plain silly:

Entanglement can be
only of identical elementary particles and must take place in
space-time, so the earliest it could have taken place was in the
expansion phase following the Big Bang. Since the vast majority
of elementary particles were not close enough together to be
entangled, except in rare instances, only a tiny portion of the
Universe could be entangled, and that randomly, such as a photon
deep in our Sun and another umpteen light-millennia away emitted
by a hot planet like Jupiter. (personal correspondence)

In any
case, jumping on the quantum bandwagon is something Radin did
not do hastily. In an interview with
Jeffrey
Mishlove for the series “Thinking Allowed,” Radin
said he thought it unlikely that quantum physics would help us
understand biological phenomena. He still admits that there are
"practical difficulties that have to be overcome before
entanglement is demonstrated in ... living systems...." (p. 16).
In fact, a
recent article on quantum mechanics in Scientific
American supports Radin's initial view. The odds of a
collection of particles in one brain being entangled with a
collection of particles in another brain, for example, are next
to impossible. Anyway, apparently there are no theoretical limitations that prevent him and
others from speculating about psi and entanglement to their
hearts' content. In the end, though, he admits he and other
parapsychologists are just guessing that psi will be explained
by quantum physics.

In chapter 12 of EM,
Radin presents his case for a quantum approach to psi. He reviews
a few ideas in quantum physics and then bridges the gap between this history and the
history of psi research with some one-liners. For example, he
simply asserts:

Quantum theory and a
vast body of supporting experiments tell us that something
unaccounted for is connecting otherwise isolated objects.
And this is precisely what psi experiences and experiments are
telling us. The parallels are so striking that it suggest that
psi is—literally—the human experience of
quantum interconnectedness. (pp. 231-232, emphasis in the
original)

He then
spends a few pages trying to justify this claim, mostly by
noting how baffled scientists like William James and Robert Jahn
have been when confronted with apparently psychic phenomena.
Then, in a final burst of hubris, Radin claims that physics has
caught up to psi research!

Over the
past century, most of the fundamental assumptions about the
fabric of physical reality have been revised in the direction
predicted by genuine psi....psi is the human experience of the
entangled universe. (p. 235)

Radin concludes his
fantasy with the following remark:

...classical physics
is wrong....in just the right way to support the reality of psi.
(p. 239)

Of course, when
classical physics was the only physics there was, defenders of
psi used classical models to try to explain how psi might work,
e.g., as a mental radio. The fact is that you don't have to be
very clever to speculate about how psi might work in any of
several models of reality. For all we know, we might live in a
universe that is enveloped in several other universes identical
to ours but ahead or behind in time. Occasionally, some people
slip into a crack in one of these other universes and appear to
have a precognition or a telepathic communication. But until the
evidence for the reality of psi is substantial, we ought to hold
off our speculating about how it works.

Anyway, Radin devotes
a whole chapter to reviewing various theories of psi. I won't
bore the reader with his entire list of candidates, but he found
five that use quantum theory to explain psi. He likes the one
that

...suggests that the
mind/brain might be a self-observing quantum object, and as
such, it resides within an entangled, nonlocal medium that just
happens to be entirely compatible with the known characteristics
of psi. (pp. 257-258)

Yes, and then again
the mind/brain might not be a quantum object at all, and the
above sentence might not have any cognitive meaning, i.e., be a
bit of bovine excrement. The fact is, this section on theories
is really a section on exercising the imagination to speculate
about how paranormal phenomena might work if they were real. The
fact is, though, that the evidence that they are real is
outweighed by the evidence that they are not real. Radin can
shout as loudly as he wants about skeptics, but their analysis
of the data is much more convincing than his.

regression to Eastern mysticism

Radin may
appear to be promoting progress in psi research, but in the end
he resurrects some old notions that critics relegated to the ash
heap long ago: he notes several times in EM that quantum physics
parallels concepts in Eastern mysticism. Remember Capra's The
Tao of Physics (1975) and Zukav's The Dancing Wu Masters
(1976)? In The
Skeptic's Dictionary entry on
Deepak Chopra, I
note:

...physicist Heinz R. Pagels, author of
The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature
vehemently rejects the notion that there is any significant
connection between the discoveries of modern physicists and
the metaphysical claims of Ayurveda. "No qualified physicist
that I know would claim to find such a connection without
knowingly committing fraud," says Dr. Pagels.

The claim that the fields of
modern physics have anything to do with the "field of
consciousness" is false. The notion that what physicists
call "the vacuum state" has anything to do with
consciousness is nonsense. The claim that large numbers of
people meditating helps reduce crime and war by creating a
unified field of consciousness is foolishness of a high
order. The presentation of the ideas of modern physics side
by side, and apparently supportive of, the ideas of the
Maharishi about pure consciousness can only be intended to
deceive those who might not know any better.

Reading these materials
authorized by the Maharishi causes me distress because I am
a man who values the truth. To see the beautiful and
profound ideas of modern physics, the labor of generations
of scientists, so willfully perverted provokes a feeling of
compassion for those who might be taken in by these
distortions. I would like to be generous to the Maharishi
and his movement because it supports world peace and other
high ideals. But none of these ideals could possibly be
realized within the framework of a philosophy that so
willfully distorts scientific truth (Pagels).

What Chopra is peddling is quantum gibberish.

Replace the
Maharishi and Chopra with Radin: what Radin is peddling is quantum
gibberish.

What new evidence is
there for psi?

Even though Radin boasts
that parapsychologists are beyond the stage of proving psi exists
and are now trying to understand how it works, he spends the first 200 pages
of EM trying
to demonstrate, with anecdotes and brief descriptions of
experiments, that psi exists no matter what the skeptics say.

Radin is well aware
of the power of anecdotes to interest people in the paranormal,
even though such stories have little scientific value. He persists in
scattering such stories throughout EM, and he resists the
temptation to go into too much detail about experiments. Thus, EM
is more readable than CU, but less impressive as documentation
of scientific research in support of psi. The anecdotes,
especially the ones that come from his own research, suffer from
having no controls. For example, he finds an interesting bit of
commentary in a precognition study, but he makes no effort to
show that the commentary was unique and that similar commentary
didn't occur many other times when nothing happened shortly
afterward that he could easily connect it to. A description of "something falling...a chaotic scene" the day before 9/11/2001
might seem impressive to some people, but similar descriptions
by the same person or others in the experiment may have been
provided hundreds of other times over the years. By selecting
this vague and ambiguous comment at this time Radin gives the false impression of
precognition. He does the same thing with his
global
consciousness data and claims the odds against chance of
getting the data he got are 1.8 million to 1 (p. 33). He admits
"this is purely speculative," but he expects us to take his word for it
that we are not dealing with coincidences here.

Much of
Radin's review in EM of the experimental evidence for psi is a
rehash of what he wrote in CU. For example, his chapter on
mind-matter interaction adds little to his discussion in CU of
dice experiments and the
PEAR lab. One
thing new, though, is Radin's linking of modern neuroscience
with old psi experiments to support his case. There's nothing
wrong with that in principle, but Radin's tactic is deceptive,
while rather clever. Radin appeals to brain imaging to defend the psi hypothesis. Using
brain imaging in psi experiments isn't new, but CU makes no
mention of it. The general idea is to find some sort of
correlation or post hoc connection
between a blip on a brain scan or EEG, and a psychic trigger
such as a person thinking or viewing something in another place.
As in other psi experiments lauded by Radin, these involve the
psi-assumption. Every one of the experiments commits the
fallacy of begging
the question. They all assume that if they get this or that
blip on a screen, it is evidence of presentiment or telepathy,
etc. The issue, however, is to prove that these blips have
anything at all to do with psi phenomena.

Radin didn't mention René Warcollier in CU,
but in EM he discusses the French psi researcher's work on why psi
subjects don't get precise images. Skeptics dismiss these
imprecise images as part of a game parapsychologists play that
involves trying to find reasons for claiming that, for example,
having a dream about
Winston
Churchill counts as a hit when the target was a painting of Max
Beckman’s Descent from the Cross. Warcollier invented
the notion that images are distorted and misperceived by psi
people because they were transmitted "scrambled, broken up into
component elements which are often transmuted into new patterns"
(Radin, EM, p. 92). Instead of shaking his head in wonder at the
claim that images appear not to match their targets because they
don't match their targets, Radin uses this tautological drivel
to open a door to a phony connection to a real science:

What
Warcollier demonstrated is compatible with what modern
cognitive neuroscience has learned about how visual images are
constructed by the brain. It implies that telepathic perceptions
bubble up into awareness from the unconscious and are
probably in the brain in the same way that we generate
images in dreams. And thus telepathic 'images' are far less
certain than sensory-driven images and subject to distortion.
(pp. 92-93, italics added)

Radin is just making
up the claim that cognitive neuroscience implies anything about
telepathic perceptions.

In CU, Radin mentions
Rupert Sheldrake twice, and only in passing. In EM, he goes into
some detail regarding Sheldrake's studies of the staring effect,
and concludes with a typically inane statistic regarding the odds of getting
the results by chance: "202 octodecillion to
1." As in CU, however, Radin ignores studies that found no
staring effect, including one done in his own lab! He makes no
mention of a study done by Marilyn Schlitz and Richard Wiseman
that found nothing interesting in a staring experiment. Radin's
name is even on the published paper, since it was done in his
lab. (See Watt, C., Schlitz, M., Wiseman, R. & Radin, D. (2005).
"Experimenter differences in a remote staring study,"
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Convention of the
Parapsychological Association, 256-260. A version of the
paper is available online
here.)

Radin still ignores frauds and hoaxes in psi

As in CU, Radin's
history of psi research in EM ignores frauds and hoaxes. For
some reason, these options are never considered as alternative
explanations for alleged psi phenomena. Radin offers many
stories in his history, but none of them are approached with any
skepticism. Worse, he is not averse to exaggeration to promote
his chosen field of endeavor. His description of Daniel Dunglas
Home's alleged feats is credulous and fawning (p. 62). My view
is a bit more skeptical. I write in my entry on levitation:

Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886) allegedly levitated
several times, according to eyewitnesses. It is more likely
that the witnesses were deceived than that Home actually
floated through space unassisted. Magician and debunker of
mediums Milbourne Christopher (1970:
174-187) duplicated some of Home's feats, though there is
no way to know for certain exactly how Home accomplished his
performance. Christopher writes:

How
could Home levitate himself in a room with the lights out?
One method used then, and later, by mediums is most
convincing. In the dark the psychic slips off his shoes as
he tells the sitters his body is becoming weightless. The
sitter to the medium's left grasps his left hand, the one to
the right puts a hand on the mystic's shoes, near the toes.
Holding his shoes together with his right hand pressing the
inner sides, the medium slowly raises them in the air as he
first squats then stands on his chair. The man holding his
hand reports the medium is ascending; so does the sitter who
touches the shoes. Until I tried this myself, it was hard to
believe that spectators in the dark room could be convinced
an ascension was being made. (p. 185)

Whether Christopher
is correct or not is beside the point. Radin makes no effort to
look for an alternative explanation to Home's performance. The
witnesses say they saw him levitate; so, he levitated. Radin
doesn't even consider the possibility that the witnesses were
tricked.

Radin
states that Home was never caught cheating.
Milbourne Christopher, however, in
ESP, Seers & Psychicsdevotes an entire chapter to Home,
exposing some of Home's tricks and speculating about others.
Despite his reputation as the medium who never got caught, Home
was caught cheating several times. Many of Home's marvels have
been duplicated by Houdini and Christopher himself (Christopher
1970: pp. 174-187).

The well-known
experiment in the laboratory was to use cards with the five
Zener symbols, but the actual cards aren't important. It was
easier for me to use random number tables than carry the
physical cards. Instead, all I did was to generate four tables
of 25 random numbers just using the numbers 1 to 5. Then I
randomly assigned a Zener symbol to each number. For each
transmission, I would then check the particular table of random
numbers and think about the corresponding symbol for 15 seconds.
Each transmission took about 6 minutes.*

We know that there was a prearranged time when Mitchell and his
friends would do their trials, but that problems prevented
things from going as planned. As a result, the recorded guesses
on Earth were made before Mitchell went through
the trials. No problem. In his published paper on the
experiment, Mitchell just changed the goal to a study of
precognition!
(Mitchell's paper, "An ESP Test from Apollo 14," was published
in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1971.) He also stated
in an interview that the fact that the timing was off didn't
matter:

That didn't seem to
make any difference. We took off forty minutes late but I didn't
try for an exact time anyway, just in the evening. We now
understand why that should work, because the sequence is
important but having the precise time is not.*

This is fantastic
news for psichologists. It means that in an ESP study one
can use data collected anywhere and any time to use as proof of
psi. How could you not like such a cooperative thing to study?

Original news reports
made it sound like there were 200 trials, leaving one to
conclude that Mitchell went through his tables eight times (there are 25
cards in a standard Zener deck). Since there are five symbols
(or numbers) in each table, chance guessing would be one of five, or 20%. Mitchell
reported that two subjects performed better than chance and two
performed worse than chance. What a shock! This is what you'd
expect from chance. News reports indicated that the group got 51
correct, which would be a hit rate of 25.5%, not bad for an
individual guessing 200 times, but not statistically significant
for a group of four. No problem. Mitchell provided the New York Times
with the number 3,000 to 1 as being the odds against getting the
results he got. Maybe this is where Radin learned to use
statistical odds as a substitute for evidence.

A closer look reveals
this story is typical of the history of psi: much ado about
nothing except manipulation and deception by the defenders of
psi. Here is an abstract of Mitchell's experiment (S=receivers
or subjects, E=the experimenter and sender):

Preflight
arrangements were made with 4 Ss noted for ESP ability for a
short "unofficial" experiment, to be carried out while the
author, who served as the E, was on the Apollo 14 mission. On 6
different days the Ss were to guess the symbol order in 1 target
run of 25 symbols being concentrated on by the E. Actually, E
was able to carry out only 4 target runs, and the timing
arrangements could not be met under flight conditions. The Ss,
a, b, c, and d, made 6, 6, 1, and 2 runs of guesses,
respectively, (a total of 15) to be checked against the 4 target
runs brought back by E. The major problem was to determine,
before checking, how the Ss probably oriented their efforts to
guess the series of 4 target columns. Three independent analyses
were conducted. In the 1st, the view was that as in a
precognition test the sequence of 4 target runs on the record
sheet would be the natural aim of the S. There were 8 runs (4
each by a and b) that could be checked by this plan; they gave a
deviation of +11. The odds are 20:1 against chance. The 2nd
analysis, initiated by E, aimed at determining the relationship
between the guesses and the time proximity of the targets. There
were 12 runs in this group (2 runs that overlapped were omitted)
and these gave a very negative deviation having odds of 3,000:1.
A 3rd analysis, also with below-chance results having odds of
25:1, followed an independent plan that cut across the other 2
analyses. The 1st 2 analyses, committed in advance, are
independent of each other. The deviation in the 1st was
positive, that in the 2nd, negative, indicating a
psi-differential response by the Ss. This effect is further
revealed in the reversed direction of distribution curves of
hits within the runs for the 2 analyses.*

Cutting through the
gobbledygook, we find that the 3000 to 1 odds was derived by an
afterthought analysis of the data that found the subjects did
not guess correctly. Parapsychologists call this
psi-missing.
If you guess better than chance, that supports the psi
hypothesis. If you don't guess better than chance, that also
supports the psi hypothesis. Psi works both way, positive and
negative. Rather than canceling each other out, they reinforce
each other in what is called "a psi-differential response." What
other scientific field would tolerate such nonsense?

Why do I spend so
much time chewing on this old rag? To emphasize to the reader
that the claim by Radin that an experiment was "successful" or
has been "replicated" in several labs should be taken with a
quantum of entangled sodium chloride. (I know; there is no such
animal. Allow me some slack.) This tactic of proclaiming
success and replication, even though the claim never withstands
scrutiny, works. Mitchell used the same tactic in an interview
where he claimed that his experiment "did show that what had
worked in the laboratory also worked in space with the same very
positive results."* I've had several people e-mail me about Radin's
claim regarding
presentiment experiments, which he claims have
been replicated in several labs, a sentiment apparently parroted
by Alex Tsakiris on his podcast, Skeptiko.

Chapter ten of EM is
called Presentiment, which Radin describes as "an intuitive
hunch that something not quite right is about to unfold" (p.
101). I guess we could say that presentiment is precognition
with a sense of foreboding. He repeats what he had to say in
chapter eight of CU, which
I've already
reviewed. To his credit, in EM Radin mentions a couple of
precognition experiments that failed to produce statistically
significant results in favor of the hypothesis (by Jerry Levin
and James Kennedy, and by John Hartwell, pp. 163-164). Then, he
cites a skin-conductance telepathy test that produced results
that seemed consistent with precognition. The needle jumps or
blips on the screen seemed to occur before the signal was
sent rather than after. Radin got inspired.

In 1993, Radin got
the idea "to monitor a person's skin conductance before, during,
and after viewing emotional and calm pictures, and then see if
the autonomic nervous system responded appropriately before
the picture appeared" (p. 184). He eventually did four tests
with mixed results, but a meta-analysis saved the day. The first
test was small (24 subjects) and he found that the subjects
reacted 2 to 3 seconds after the presentation of the
stimulus, as measured by a blip on a screen hooked up to a skin
conductance measuring device. He also found blips occurring
before the stimulus and he calculated their odds against
chance at being 500 to 1, for what it's worth.

His second experiment
had 50 subjects. All he says about it is that the "results were
in the predicted direction, but weren't as strong as those
observed in the first experiment." The third experiment had 47
subjects. He says it "resulted in a strong presentiment effect,
with odds against chance of 2,500 to 1." The third experiment
used different hardware, software, and pictures. The fourth
study produced results that "weren't statistically significant."

Radin concludes:

These studies suggest
that when the average person is about to see an emotional
picture, he or she will respond before that picture appears
(under double-blind conditions). (p. 188, emphasis in the
original)

That's how Radin sees
his work. I see a mixed bag of results that assumes blips
on a screen are caused by psychic means. The studies may be
double-blind, but they don't use meaningful controls. Radin's kicker,
however, is his meta-analysis. He lumped together the data from
the four studies and produced a paper published in The
Journal of Scientific Exploration (2004) called "Electrodermal
Presentiments of Future Emotions." Voila! The odds against
chance of getting just the results he got? 125,000 to 1, he says
(EM, p. 188).

He concludes his
defense of the evidence for presentiment with mention of several
"replications," one of which involved testing earthworms. In the
earthworm experiment, Radin says that the "results were very
nearly statistically significant" (p. 171). How comforting.
Other "replications" involved using machines that measure heart
rate and electrical activity in the brain, as well as skin
conductance. All assumed that the various blips they produced
were caused by paranormal phenomena.

Radin continues the
practice in (EM) that he used in (CU):
distorting data with misleading visual
representations. In EM, the main trick is to deceive by scale.
By using large measurement intervals on the axes of his graphs,
Radin makes very small differences or changes appear to be
large. The blips on electronic screens or devices
that report changes in galvanic skin response, heart rate, or
brain activity look impressive when
visually displayed in graphs that distort the data, making small
differences appear much larger. Radin really has no idea what is causing the blips. He
assumes it is something paranormal, but he makes no effort to
test alternative hypotheses. Not one experimenter tested the
hypothesis that the blips occurring before being shown a
stimulus were due to delayed responses to or memories of earlier
experiences with the pictures. For all Radin knows, the blips
represent noise, messages from aliens in other galaxies,
telepathic messages from gorillas in zoos, or Zeus (Jim
Alcock: 2003). Even more curious is that, as Radin admits, "the
results in these studies are relatively small in magnitude" (p.
179). Yes, and as a result his work resembles
pathological
science.

conclusion

In EM, Radin takes
meta-analysis to an
even higher level of ludicrousness
than he did in
CU. He
lumps together about 1,000 studies on dream psi,
ganzfeld psi,
staring, distant intention, dice PK, and
RNG PK. He
concludes that the odds against chance of getting these results
are 10104
against 1 (p. 276). He says: "there can be little doubt that
something interesting is going on" (p. 275).

The vast
majority of scientists recognize what is probably going on: when it walks like a delusion
and talks like a delusion, it probably is a delusion. Having a
delusion does not mean you are mentally ill. Most normal people
have delusions: beliefs that no amount of evidence against can
shake, even though the evidence is, in fact, preponderantly
against.

I have
no idea why Radin does not see that he is begging the question
with his method of assuming that if he gets a statistical
anomaly or a blip on screen it is evidence of the paranormal. He
assumes that all explanations of weird phenomena in terms of
physics, psychology, fraud, hoax, coincidence, and the like are
not as tenable as the psi explanation. Furthermore, I don't
understand why Radin would think I or any other skeptic wouldn't
like to see some good evidence for telepathy, precognition, or
psychokinesis. I think it would be wonderful to find people with
such abilities. If I thought there were good evidence for their
reality, I'd try to develop them myself.